The gathering at the Grey Lynn Library Hall promises to take on a ‘corrupted election’, 5G, Covid-19 and ‘Satanic ritual abuse’.

A new online group has formed to combat conspiracy and disinformation, and their first project is challenging an event scheduled for a council-run venue in the Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn tomorrow. Hosted by “Mothers Who Stand for Freedom”, the “strategic planning workshop” at the library hall promises to address “issues of national importance” which read like a list of conspiracy theorist talking points: 5G, Covid-19, climate change, vaccination, election corruption and “satanic ritual abuse” (SRA).

Rabbit Hole Resistance has as its first action lodged a complaint with Auckland Council about the event. RHR is “a support group for people who are worried about their friends and whānau drifting into conspiracy theories, but it’s also a non-violent action group”, said Anke Richter, a journalist with a special interest in cults and conspiracy theories and one of the group’s founders.

Richter has spent time with alternative communities and cults and has seen how conspiracist views develop. “I’ve gone through my own despair and disbelief,” she said. Now she’s seeking to help others learn to communicate about conspiracy theories and with conspiracy theorists. “We said, ‘we know this is a problem, we know this is happening, what can we do?’”

Tomorrow’s three-hour workshop offers “an interactive opportunity to meet with like-minded freedom lovers and plan out some real action for the coming months”, reads an event page. Participants include one speaker who believes climate change is a “huge hoax perpetrated against the human race”.

In attendance at a post-event “Ponsonby pub crawl” will be Damien De Ment, a New Zealand-based YouTube propagandist who has promoted far-right disinformation and white nationalist conspiracy theories, and spoke at an Advance NZ anti-lockdown protest earlier this year. He has falsely asserted that the US election was rigged, a new world order is controlling the planet, and Jacinda Ardern is leading the “Islamification” of New Zealand. He has advertised the Beyond Politics event on his Facebook page.

“The whole kaupapa is really around compassionate communication and non-violent action,” said Richter of Rabbit Hole Resistance. The group has in this case called and emailed Auckland Council to make them aware such a group may be spreading misinformation in a public venue.

Jacinta O’Reilly, an activist and member of Rabbit Hole Resistance, said Mothers Who Stand for Freedom are “an anti-Covid-19 conspiracy theory group, but they are promoting themselves without completely identifying what their view is”.

One complaint from a member of RHR, sent to six members of the Waitematā local board, drew a link between the slogans endorsed by Mothers Who Stand for Freedom and the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory.

“The Mothers Who Stand for Freedom group is a QAnon group. QAnon has been classified by the FBI as a terrorist group,” it reads. “QAnon has been resulting in more and more violence overseas, and we’ve seen an uptick in violent, right-wing extremism in the last couple of years in this country. The ‘Covid-19 is a hoax’ rhetoric is obviously a risk to our public health. NZ has a strong response to Covid-19 and these groups work to reduce that or influence public opinion with outright false information.”

In a press release dated September 23, Mothers Who Stand for Freedom called on governor general Dame Patsy Reddy to use reserve powers to repeal the Covid-19 Public Health Response Act. They described this action as “effectively ending lockdowns, closing detention centres and restoring our Bill of Rights”. There are no Covid-19 detention centres in New Zealand. The end of the press release stated “We are sovereign. We are free.” This exhortation echoes language used by members of QAnon.

The group has already had one event cancelled: a series of lectures on SRA at the Rudolph Steiner house in Ellerslie. SRA is a common theme in QAnon lore: a core conspiracy that a deep state global network of some sort is abusing and trafficking children (for immortality, for a high, for beauty).

In the US, panic caused by the QAnon Wayfair conspiracy overwhelmed a human trafficking hotline, preventing people in real need from receiving help. In New Zealand, conspiracy theorist groups have burned down cellphone towers and trespassed on a boat they (incorrectly) believed Ghislaine Maxwell resided in.

The group’s website and Facebook page don’t declare any links to the US-born conspiracy network. In October, Facebook declared it would remove QAnon-linked groups from its platform.

Auckland Council’s manager of community places, Kevin Marriott, told The Spinoff the council is aware of the concerns regarding the Beyond Politics event but will not be taking action.

“Our community venues are places where Aucklanders come together to connect, socialise, learn and grow. We operate them on the principle that the venues are accessible to all and available for anyone to hire, provided the use is lawful. This and other requirements are clearly stipulated in the terms and conditions of use, and we work closely with our customers to ensure that they can comply with them.

“Accepting a booking through our online booking system is not an endorsement of an event by the council. It’s also important to note that the Grey Lynn Library is not involved in this event in any way.”

Last year a far-right speakers’ event at the Bruce Mason Theatre in Takapuna was cancelled after Auckland Council’s regional facilities department ruled it posed a health and safety threat. Auckland mayor Phil Goff praised the decision at the time, saying “the right to free speech does not mean the right to be provided with an Auckland Council platform for that speech”.

Mothers Who Stand for Freedom responded to comment saying that they are not connected to the QAnon movement. “We aren’t organising the Saturday event just supporting,” a spokesperson said. “A South Island Maori leader is facilitating this event. As far as we know he has no involvement with the Q movement.”

This piece has been updated with comment from Mothers Who Stand for Freedom.

Boris Johnson has announced that the Pfizer vaccine will be distributed from next week. How did that happen, and are they cutting corners? Siouxsie Wiles explains.

The UK has become the first country in the world to approve a Covid-19 vaccine. It’s an emergency approval but means they’re likely to start vaccinating people in a matter of weeks. It’s the same vaccine the New Zealand government recently signed a binding agreement to secure early next year. Here’s the background to the UK announcement.

Which vaccine is this?

It’s the Pfizer vaccine that has been licensed from BioNTech. That’s one of the mRNA vaccines that’s made up of the genetic material that codes for a specific part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The mRNA vaccines are a completely new technology when it comes to making human vaccines which means there aren’t any that are currently fully licensed for use in humans.

A quick reminder: the idea behind these vaccines is that by introducing the virus’s genetic material into our body, our cells will read the code and make the protein for our immune system to see. As I’ve explained before, the advantages of this approach are that it is really quick to develop vaccines like this and much easier to upscale and manufacture. The downside is that they tend to need to be stored at very cold temperatures. Like -70 degrees Celsius cold. That’s because mRNA is pretty unstable so keeping it cold helps to stop it being degraded which would render it useless. The need for such cold storage means their rollout will be a little more complicated than the standard childhood vaccines.

How did the UK get to the front of the vaccine queue?

On November 20 Pfizer announced that they were submitting an emergency use authorisation to US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In that press release they said they had already initiated “rolling submissions across the globe including in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and the UK”. At the same time, Pfizer also announced they expected to be able to produce up to 50 million doses before the end of the year and would be ready to distribute the vaccine within hours of it being authorised for use.

In other words, the UK are the first to announce they’ve looked at all the data provided by Pfizer and decided it shows the vaccine is safe and effective enough to grant it an emergency use authorisation. The FDA aren’t having their meeting till December 10.

What’s an emergency use authorisation?

Under normal circumstances, medicines have to go through a rigorous approvals process before they can be used outside of human trials. An emergency use authorisation allows this process to be bypassed temporarily. It applies to both unapproved medicines as well as unapproved uses of already approved medicines. It’s a way to ensure that in a public health emergency, medicines that may be of help can get to more people than would be possible if they were only available as part of a trial.

Importantly, the agencies involved do still look at the data provided by the companies to decide if the medicine is at least safe and preferably effective enough to start rolling out. But an emergency use authorisation does require a much lower level of evidence than a full-blown approvals process. That’s why the authorisation will be limited to a specific number of batches and isn’t a general authorisation to put the particular medicine on the market.

Does the emergency use authorisation mean the vaccine works then?

Not necessarily. Lots of experimental treatments have been given emergency authorisation use, especially in the US, only to be found not to work. Hydroxychloroquine is a good example. And examples like that have the potential to put people’s health and safety at risk as well as erode trust in our regulatory institutions.

What’s really important is that the data the regulatory institutions are using to make their decisions is made available for everyone to see. The data from the Phase I and II trials of the Pfizer vaccine has been published (see here and here and here) but the Phase III data hasn’t yet. Apparently, this is currently under review, but it would have been good if they had made it available to the research community as a pre-print while the formal peer-review process was happening.

Wait, so does that mean the vaccine might not work?

Possibly. Though another way of phrasing it would be that it might not end up working as well as we need it to or better than another vaccine. One big problem with emergency use authorisations in general is that they basically come at the expense of clinical trials. Once a medicine is granted emergency use authorisation, less people will want to be involved in a trial in case they end up in the placebo group and not receive the medicine at all. The less people in the placebo group, the bigger the risk that we end up with not enough data to really establish important long-term outcomes, like safety, or in the case of vaccines, how long protection lasts and whether it prevents infection or just the disease.

Why has the UK needed to go down the emergency use authorisation route?

Because their Covid-19 response has been absolutely abysmal. The Conservative government has spent much of the last decade dismantling the country’s welfare state and selling it off bit by bit, including to their friends and family. This has just accelerated during the pandemic. The best way to sum up their response is to just say that they gave billions of pounds to a private company to set up a new contact tracing system that doesn’t work. They’ve cleverly called it NHS Track and Trace so the publicly-funded national health service will be blamed for its failure. It is run by a former jockey who is married to Conservative MP who, wait for it, served as the UK’s anti-corruption “champion”.

Under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the British response to this crisis has been characterised by buffoonery, venal self-interest and a blinkered, ideologically contorted incompetence. That is why people are dying. That is why people are desperate. And that is why they are being forced to rush through at a dangerous pace the rollout of this vaccine.